Email notification is useful to keep users up-to-date on tickets/issues of interest, and also provides a convenient way to post all ticket changes to a dedicated mailing list. For example, this is how the ​Trac-tickets mailing list is set up.

Disabled by default, notification can be activated and configured in trac.ini.

Receiving Notification Mails

When reporting a new ticket or adding a comment, enter a valid email address or your username in the reporter, assigned to/owner or cc field. Trac will automatically send you an email when changes are made to the ticket (depending on how notification is configured).

This is useful to keep up-to-date on an issue or enhancement request that interests you.

How to use your username to receive notification mails

To receive notification mails, you can either enter a full email address or your username. To get notified with a simple username or login, you need to specify a valid email address in the Preferences page.

Alternatively, a default domain name (smtp_default_domain) can be set in the TracIni file (see Configuration Options below). In this case, the default domain will be appended to the username, which can be useful for an "Intranet" kind of installation.

When using apache and mod_kerb for authentication against Kerberos / Active Directory, usernames take the form (username@EXAMPLE.LOCAL). To avoid this being interpreted as an email address, add the Kerberos domain to (ignore_domains).

Configuring SMTP Notification

Configuration Options

These are the available options for the [notification] section in trac.ini.

[notification]

admit_domains

Comma-separated list of domains that should be considered as
valid for email addresses (such as localdomain).

(no default)

always_notify_owner

Always send notifications to the ticket owner (since 0.9).

false

always_notify_reporter

Always send notifications to any address in the reporter
field.

false

always_notify_updater

Always send notifications to the person who causes the ticket
property change and to any previous updater of that ticket.

true

ambiguous_char_width

Which width of ambiguous characters (e.g. 'single' or
'double') should be used in the table of notification mail.
If 'single', the same width as characters in US-ASCII. This is
expected by most users. If 'double', twice the width of
US-ASCII characters. This is expected by CJK users. (since
0.12.2)

single

batch_subject_template

Like ticket_subject_template but for batch modifications.
By default, the template is $prefix Batch modify: $tickets_descr.
(since 1.0)

$prefix Batch modify: $tickets_descr

email_sender

Name of the component implementing IEmailSender.
This component is used by the notification system to send emails.
Trac currently provides SmtpEmailSender for connecting to an SMTP
server, and SendmailEmailSender for running a sendmail-compatible
executable. (since 0.12)

SmtpEmailSender

ignore_domains

Comma-separated list of domains that should not be considered
part of email addresses (for usernames with Kerberos domains).

(no default)

mime_encoding

Specifies the MIME encoding scheme for emails.
Valid options are 'base64' for Base64 encoding, 'qp' for
Quoted-Printable, and 'none' for no encoding, in which case mails will
be sent as 7bit if the content is all ASCII, or 8bit otherwise.
(since 0.10)

none

sendmail_path

Path to the sendmail executable.
The sendmail program must accept the -i and -f options.
(since 0.12)

Email address(es) to always send notifications to,
addresses can be seen by all recipients (Cc:).

(no default)

smtp_default_domain

Default host/domain to append to address that do not specify
one.

(no default)

smtp_enabled

Enable email notification.

false

smtp_from

Sender address to use in notification emails.

trac@localhost

smtp_from_author

Use the action author as the sender of notification emails.
(since 1.0)

false

smtp_from_name

Sender name to use in notification emails.

(no default)

smtp_password

Password for SMTP server. (since 0.9)

(no default)

smtp_port

SMTP server port to use for email notification.

25

smtp_replyto

Reply-To address to use in notification emails.

trac@localhost

smtp_server

SMTP server hostname to use for email notifications.

localhost

smtp_subject_prefix

Text to prepend to subject line of notification emails.
If the setting is not defined, then the [$project_name] prefix.
If no prefix is desired, then specifying an empty option
will disable it. (since 0.10.1)

__default__

smtp_user

Username for SMTP server. (since 0.9)

(no default)

ticket_subject_template

A Genshi text template snippet used to get the notification subject.
By default, the subject template is $prefix #$ticket.id: $summary.
$prefix being the value of the smtp_subject_prefix option.
(since 0.11)

$prefix #$ticket.id: $summary

use_public_cc

Recipients can see email addresses of other CC'ed recipients.
If this option is disabled (the default), recipients are put on BCC.
(since 0.10)

false

use_short_addr

Permit email address without a host/domain (i.e. username only).
The SMTP server should accept those addresses, and either append
a FQDN or use local delivery. (since 0.10)

summary: The ticket summary, with the old value if the summary was edited.

ticket: The ticket model object (see ​model.py). Individual ticket fields can be addressed by appending the field name separated by a dot, e.g. $ticket.milestone.

Customizing the e-mail content

The notification e-mail content is generated based on ticket_notify_email.txt in trac/ticket/templates. You can add your own version of this template by adding a ticket_notify_email.txt to the templates directory of your environment. The default looks like this:

Customizing e-mail content for MS Outlook

Out-of-the-box, MS Outlook normally presents plain text e-mails with a variable-width font; the ticket properties table will most certainly look like a mess in MS Outlook. This can be fixed with some customization of the e-mail template.

The table of ticket properties is replaced with a list of a selection of the properties. A tab character separates the name and value in such a way that most people should find this more pleasing than the default table, when using MS Outlook.

Using GMail as the SMTP relay host

where user and password match an existing GMail account, i.e. the ones you use to log in on ​http://gmail.com

Alternatively, you can use smtp_port = 25.
You should not use smtp_port = 465. It will not work and your ticket submission may deadlock. Port 465 is reserved for the SMTPS protocol, which is not supported by Trac. See ​#7107 for details.

Troubleshooting

If you cannot get the notification working, first make sure the log is activated and have a look at the log to find if an error message has been logged. See TracLogging for help about the log feature.

Notification errors are not reported through the web interface, so the user who submit a change or a new ticket never gets notified about a notification failure. The Trac administrator needs to look at the log to find the error trace.

Permission denied error

This error usually comes from a security settings on the server: many Linux distributions do not let the web server (Apache, ...) to post email message to the local SMTP server.

Many users get confused when their manual attempts to contact the SMTP server succeed:

telnet localhost 25

The trouble is that a regular user may connect to the SMTP server, but the web server cannot:

sudo -u www-data telnet localhost 25

In such a case, you need to configure your server so that the web server is authorized to post to the SMTP server. The actual settings depend on your Linux distribution and current security policy. You may find help browsing the Trac ​MailingList archive.

Suspected spam error

Some SMTP servers may reject the notification email sent by Trac.

The default Trac configuration uses Base64 encoding to send emails to the recipients. The whole body of the email is encoded, which sometimes trigger false positive SPAM detection on sensitive email servers. In such an event, it is recommended to change the default encoding to "quoted-printable" using the mime_encoding option.

Quoted printable encoding works better with languages that use one of the Latin charsets. For Asian charsets, it is recommended to stick with the Base64 encoding.